A hotly tipped British website that allows users to "browse through time" is the latest in a pack of new businesses aiming to digitally augment human memory.

Miomi, a start-up founded by three students, is pledging to deliver "a completely new way of … capturing the world's memories online".

Members of the public will be asked to contribute "key moments in their lives" – by uploading photo, video, audio and textual content – which can then be shared with the world at large, a selected group of friends, or kept private.

Personal memories will be attached to "one giant timeline stretching from the dawn of time into the distant future", Miomi says. The backbone of the historical record will draw on publicly accessible information from sources such as Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia.

Miomi's mission – "to democratise time and history by capturing the entire world's memories online" – may sound outlandish. There will be doubts, for instance, over whether users can be kept interested "into the distant future" when users of other social networks have proven chronically disloyal.

Nevertheless, the premise has the technology sector's giants engaged.

Microsoft, the world's largest software developer, says Miomi has the potential to be "the next Facebook or even better than Facebook". When Miomi won Oxford University's Idea Idol competition (a version of Dragons' Den) last year, Brightstation Ventures, the venture capital house, told the founders, Charly Toni, Thomas Whitfield and Richard Schreiber, to forget the £5,000 prize money – instead they could have "whatever it takes" to make Miomi happen.

The business now faces fierce competition, with a host of rivals also building "surrogate memory" systems. The broad industry goal, researchers say, is to allow a 65-year-old, say, to be able to pinpoint a conversation he had in his teens as easily as today's schoolchildren tap out a Google search.

Miomi, which aims to make money through advertising, says it hopes to appeal to groups ranging from tourists wanting to preserve holiday snaps – a role where it will go head-to-head with rival online repositories such as Photobucket and Facebook itself – to "truth seekers" who want to uncover the realities behind, say, the Iraq war, by accessing first-hand accounts, territory traditionally covered by journalists and latterly by bloggers.

Other ventures looking at how human memory can be improved on include reQall, a US-based group that has developed "a digital memory service" that it says enables users to remember important numbers, thoughts, tasks and events.

When users call a free phone number, reQall converts their words into text, organises those recordings and sends reminders via e-mails, text messages and other media. The system is already up and running in the United States, where it is one of the applications promoted for the iPhone on Apple's website. It will launch in the UK shortly.

The senior team behind reQall are all ex-Apple. Rao Machiraju, reQall's co-founder and chief executive, was a principal scientist at Apple for ten years.

Microsoft's flagship project for exploring the digital augmentation of human memory is MyLifeBits. The project includes a continuing experiment in "lifetime storage" and a software research effort.

In the experiment, Gordon Bell, a Microsoft staffer and founder of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, has captured what he calls "a surrogate memory" on computer – a lifetime's worth of books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures and voice recordings that are stored digitally.

"He is now totally paperless," a Microsoft spokesman says.

To make sure he doesn't miss details of daily encounters, Mr Bell wears a SenseCam – a camera fitted with an infrared sensor that picks up on body heat and takes snapshots of anyone else sharing a room with him.

The parallel software part of the MyLifeBits project is working on a system that allows users to store, tag and search for their digital "memories".

Those bullish on the prospects for such systems point to ageing populations in developed countries such as he UK and US and declining prices for digital storage capacity.

For instance, the advisers to reQall include Gordon Bell, head of Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group, and Peter Cochrane, BT's former chief technologist. A source close to the company describes them as "senior technologists of a certain age".

He adds: "Perhaps even the best technology minds could use a little help with their memory as they get older."

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